Barnabas Ministries UK

Rev. E. Anderson

A PEARL OF GREAT VALUE

by Marcia Evans

Did the gift of the seed pearl come one day too late?

It was Thursday of my high school graduation week. Thirty of us seniors, fifteen boys and fifteen girls, had been summoned to a mysterious ‘secret meeting’ in the science room. Why us? We all wondered. Why, of all the soon-to-be-graduates, had this particular group been called together?

The science teacher, Mr York, met our puzzled glances with a smile. In his late thirties, prematurely bald, and his bow tie was much a signature as his horn-rimmed glasses. He proceeded to hand each of us a small white box tied with a pink or blue ribbon.

‘During the past three years,’ Mr York began, Tve come to know you well. And I see something in each of you that makes me excited about your future. In your box you will find a brooch or a tie pin decorated with a seed pearl. That pearl stands for your potential -the things you have going for you. Boys and girls, the world is your oyster. Just as a seed placed inside an oyster can grow into a pearl of great value, so each of you has a seed of greatness within.’

As we untied the ribbons I bit my lip to hold back tears. How much Mr York’s words would have meant, just one day earlier, to someone who’d never seen any greatness in herself! I opened the box and stared at the tiny pearl set in a silver brooch. Would have meant, but not now. The previous day, I’d learned I was pregnant.

The news spelled the end of a dream: my own and my mother’s. As long as I could remember, Mother had set aside a few dollars each week from her job at the grocery store towards a college education for my older sister, Marianne, and me. Education, she would tell us, was the way to escape the life of the coal mines. The life that mottled my grandfather’s face with indelible blue scarring, that drove men from their shift at Number 8 Mine into the many bars in our town, that turned strong young men into invalids.

I was three years old when my father Was admitted to hospital. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis, developed from years of breathing coal dust, but at that time the disease was considered such a stigma I was told he was in the Army. Once a month Mother and Marianne and I would make the long drive from Coaldale to the sanatorium. I could never understand why all the ‘soldiers’ wore bathrobes.

Even after he was discharged five years later to a rehabilitation programme, Mother’s wages often fed the family. Her dream that one day Marianne and I would change the pattern was one born out of hardship.

Marianne! Perhaps I would have lacked self-confidence anyway, but by comparison with her … Beautiful and brilliant, top girl in her class, school orator, National Society student, drum majorette, Carnival Queen, Marianne seemed to be everything that I, with my braces and Coke-bottle glasses, could never hope to be. Five years younger, I was still in secondary school when Marianne fulfilled her part of Mother’s dream by graduating from college. Now, instead of pride, I’d brought shame on the family: in our close-knit community, premarital sex was a scandal.

Dan and I were married two weeks after my graduation. We’d wanted this, but not until we’d finished college and started our careers. With a family to support, Dan dropped his own career plans and entered the Army. We had three children, and were transferred from base to base, moving ten times in seven years. Constantly uprooted, living nowhere long enough for me to do anything but settle in before packing up to move again, I would look at the little charm dangling at my wrist and wonder what ‘greatness’ Mr York had imagined he saw in me. Finally, I tucked my charm bracelet away in a drawer.

After ten years of being constantly on the move, Dan took a civilian job near our home town. It was great to be back in familiar surroundings, and great to be near our families, but of course the pearl had come back with me too. I hid it away in a drawer again, but it was. not so easy to shut it out of my mind. Increasingly it chafed and prodded me. You have potential. Find it! Use it!

Now that our youngest child was in school, I thought, perhaps I could do volunteer work. I threw myself into children’s theatre, a singing group, driving for Meals-on-Wheels. On top of all this, when the restlessness continued, I tried various jobs. I clerked at Mont­gomery Ward, managed a florist shop, taught aerobics, and even delivered singing telegrams.

I was busy, I was attempting to help others, I was adding to the family income, but still I was restless. I would open that drawer, look at the bracelet and think, ‘Is any of this building on that little seed Mr York saw?’

At night, after the family were asleep, the old goal of college would come back and keep me awake, tossing and turning. But I was thirty-five years old! It had been seventeen years since I’d writ­ten an essay paper or taken an exam.

My mother must have guessed at my turmoil, because one after­noon as we talked on the telephone while I started supper, she said, “Remember the money I saved to send you to college, Marcia? It’s still there.’

I could only stare at the receiver in my hand. Seventeen years had not been enough to blunt Mother’s dream. When Mr York had spoken of ‘things going for you’, I hadn’t been able to think of a angle one. But now that I looked about for them, they were every­where! A mother’s dream. A husband’s encouragement.

It took me six more months to work up the courage, but in September 1985 I enrolled at my local University. Of course all my self-doubts enrolled with me. When my aptitude tests pointed to a career as a teacher, I was incredulous. Teachers were confident people like Mr York, not people like me. The tests were so definitive that I entered the teacher-training programme. By the end of the second term I was ready to quit. I was competing with bright young people half my age and feeding my family packaged meals in a dusty house. On the two-hour daily commute, I would look heavenwards and ask God whether a college degree could possibly be in His plan for me.

For self-doubters, quitting always seems the sensible thing. Our daughter Kerry would be entering college in September. Instead of straining the family budget I should have been earning money for her education.

One May afternoon in my freshman year, after a particularly stressful class session, I drove home in tears. ‘God,’ I prayed, ‘If you really want me to stay in school, please find a way to show me.’

The following Saturday I ran into Mrs York at the dentist’s office. I told her about the seed pearl and how it had goaded me back to school. ‘But it’s turning out to be too hard.’

‘I know,’ she sympathized. ‘My husband didn’t start college till his thirties either.’

I listened in amazement as she described struggles just like my own. Sitting on his courses, I’d assumed Mr York had been teaching for years and years; from his wife I learned that my graduating class had been his very first. I saw that chance meeting as the nudge I needed in order to stick out the next three years.

Sure enough, on graduating, I knew that I’d found the ‘something’ Mr York had seen. I took a job teaching English at a local school. Due to the years I’d spent away from school, I tried to bring the workaday world into the classroom. Newspapers were as much a part of my curriculum as the classics, factory visits and talks by local employers as important as Shakespeare.

Towards the end of my first year, the principal stunned me with the news that he was nominating me for a national award for excel­lence in first-year teaching. In the application, I was to tell how one of my own teachers had inspired me. Of course, I told the story of the seed pearl. Only as I described the way that charm had dogged and pestered me did I realize that it had functioned exactly as a seed in an oyster is supposed to: an irritant and a discomfort, never letting the oyster alone until it has built something larger out of that tiny beginning.

In September 1990, I was one of one hundred teachers to receive the first-year award. More importantly, Mr York was given a Teacher Tribute Award and honoured by Newsweek magazine. When the two of us met for a newspaper interview I learned how appropriate the timing was: Mr York would be retiring at the end of the year.

I learned something else that day: to the reporter, Mr York revealed that he, too, had seen himself as a loser. After getting poor grades all through high school, he’d drifted for a dozen years, going from job to job, unable to believe in the future because he didn’t believe in himself. What had turned him around? ‘Seeing other people’s faith in me.’

Suddenly, I saw a science classroom and thirty high school seniors opening small white boxes. ‘That’s what we had in common, wasn’t it?’ I said as understanding dawned. ‘The kids you gave the seed pearls to. You saw thirty young people who lacked self-confidence.’

‘I saw thirty people’, he said, ‘with seeds of something great.